Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (55 page)

LIU SHIKUN
, who suffered most of all the top prizewinners in the First Tchaikovsky Competition, enjoyed the greatest resurgence. In 1991 he immigrated to Hong Kong and paid his way by giving piano lessons. After a year, he had saved enough to open his own piano school. He now owns a vast network of kindergartens stretching across China, where piano is taught as the bedrock of disciplined study. Persecuted during much of his life for the vocation his father thrust on him, by making it widely available he now presides over an unprecedented explosion of Western classical music that would have dumbfounded his oppressors.

Lev Vlassenko, Liu’s joint silver medalist, had a distinguished career as a teacher and concert pianist despite his fickle nerves. After thirty-nine years as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, he took up faculty positions in Indiana and Boston before moving to Australia. He died there in 1996, aged sixty-seven, a vigorous man taken unaccountably early, loved and mourned by his large family. They still gather often at the bright green dacha, which is now well within Moscow’s city limits.

Naum Shtarkman, Van’s friend and the bronze medalist in 1958, was released from prison and married. For years he was permitted to teach and play only on the fringes of the Soviet music world, but after Gorbachev’s reforms, he was rehabilitated and reclaimed his career as a concert pianist and a professor at the conservatory. In 1989 his son Alexander was a finalist in the Cliburn Competition. Naum died in 2006.

Van Cliburn slowly lifted himself out of retirement after his sensational comeback at the Washington summit. In the summer of 1989, the year his Tchaikovsky disc went platinum, he returned to Russia for the first time in seventeen years, at Raisa Gorbachev’s invitation, taking along Rildia Bee, now ninety-two, and an entourage of friends. As the chartered jet entered Soviet airspace he sat down at his rehearsal piano and spiritedly
played the Soviet anthem. The party landed in the early hours to find reporters and cameramen waiting with throngs of fans—among them the indefatigable
Irina Garmash and the rest of the Van Club—who cheered him as a returning hero. After a 3:00 a.m. press conference, he made his ritual visit to Red Square and arrived at the National Hotel sometime in the morning. Henrietta Belayeva and Ella and Aschen Mikoyan crowded into his three-room suite, along with dozens of other old friends, and stayed until the early hours. Lev Vlassenko came to visit, and Kirill Kondrashin’s sons represented their father, who had died in 1981. Rildia Bee sat smiling,
swaddled in a fur coat in the July heat. Outside, women thronged the sidewalk beneath Van’s balcony, holding out
flowers and watermelons, old programs and photographs. He greeted them by name, hugged them, and asked about their families and lives.

Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev attended his first concert, at Tchaikovsky Hall.
“We are friends,” Van said in Russian from the stage: “How full my heart is.” He handed over a stack of large-denomination bills as a donation to Raisa Gorbachev’s Soviet Culture Fund; his earnings would also go to support Russian culture. Then, to Gorbachev’s amusement, Van announced that now that private property was permitted, he was going to buy a Moscow apartment. At the end, tearful fans threw flowers and screamed and surged to the front. The Gorbachevs joined in the standing ovation, and backstage they
invited Van and Rildia Bee for a long private meeting. The hosts served tea and fruit and apple pie, and Van presented them with an engraved sterling silver Tiffany plate and a Fort Worth Club
jogging outfit. Gorbachev spoke of bringing peace to a world tired of war, and offered to fly the entire Moscow Philharmonic to Leningrad so Van could play in Russia’s second city; the resident orchestra was on vacation, and some fans had been on the waiting list for tickets for the past seventeen years. Afterward so many well-wishers jammed the hallways that Van’s party was jostled and punched and began fearing for their lives.
“If you love him, don’t kill him!” screamed Beth Rodzinski, wife of the Cliburn Foundation president. When Van
played at the conservatory the next night for his regular fans, he came back for four encores, perspiring like a spent athlete in the hot hall but putting
his whole heart into the music. On the last note he nearly fell off the piano bench but spun round toward the crowd, who threw so many flowers that he picked them up and threw them back. Afterward a police squad had to form a human shield to extract him from his dressing room.

Sweeping into a government grocery, Van commandeered all five shopping carts and filled them with cases of Sprite and Evian water, cheese, smoked salmon, a mop, a basket of fruit, perfume, wine, and carrot juice.
“He loves to shop,” Rildia Bee explained. Yet the bounty was for his fans and guests, not for him. Everywhere he went, he handed out red roses and goodie bags of Yankee Doodle snack cakes, pocket calculators, watches, and sodas. He ordered so many bouquets of red carnations to garland Tchaikovsky’s statue that they
arrived by bus. There were parties at Spaso House and the conservatory, where he was awarded a master’s degree and the choir sang Rachmaninoff. At a bash for Aschen Mikoyan’s fortieth birthday, he gave her 105 red roses, five more than he sent Raisa Gorbachev.
Back at the suite after one concert, he stripped to his T-shirt and boxers and gabbed with his Russian friends in his bedroom, drinking vodka from a water glass and stealthily asking for refills, so Rildia Bee didn’t see. One night, when he stepped onto the hotel balcony to salute the crowds, together they broke into a
rendition of “Moscow Nights.” After a two-week tour, the Van Club waved him away and went home to add to their treasuries of souvenirs, hoping not to have to wait so long for another visit.

Back home Van played the
occasional benefit concert and threw wild birthday parties for Rildia Bee, hiring the Fort Worth Symphony or
flying Roberta Peters down to sing at a Viennese evening. The
Rildia Bee O’Bryan Cliburn Organ rose in their church, Broadway Baptist; with 10,615 pipes, it was the largest in Texas and the largest French-style organ in the world. In 1994 he finally made a comeback tour, with the Moscow Philharmonic, generating acres of print and front-page headlines. At Grant Park in Chicago he
played to 350,000, far surpassing his earlier record and, at
$125,000, his earlier fee. Yet the
tour quickly stumbled. At the Hollywood Bowl on his sixtieth birthday, he suffered bouts of dizziness and dropped Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3, instead playing some solo encores before Johnny Mathis wheeled out an enormous piano-shaped cake and asked the audience to sing “Happy Birthday”; one newspaper unkindly called the show
“pathetic” and a “fiasco.” Age had acted on Van’s nerves like a gale on a tree, and the Rachmaninoff never returned. He recovered with a dazzling performance at the Met, but halfway through, excruciating pains in his head and right arm gave him a premonition that
Rildia Bee was dying. He dedicated the concert to her, recited a poem he wrote her when he was fourteen, and rushed to her bedside in Fort Worth, where he held her hand as she passed away peacefully, aged ninety-seven.

By then Van had not been close to Tom Zaremba for some time. He sent him away, and in 1997 Zaremba
sued for palimony, claiming millions in cash and property as his due for looking after Van’s affairs during their partnership. For maximum embarrassment, he alleged that Van had exposed him to the AIDS virus by sleeping with men who were HIV-positive, though his lawyer acknowledged that Zaremba did not have AIDS and had no reason to believe that Van was HIV-positive. The suit
failed, and failed again on appeal, and Fort Worth society closed ranks and noticed nothing. Yet, for Van, whose life had been a long exercise in discretion, it was the cruelest outing. These were difficult years, and he was a frailer figure, drinking more and occasionally getting into
blazing rows with old friends. He spoke to his
astrologist almost daily and fretted over horoscopes with Nancy Reagan, whose kitchen phone number was pinned to the wall next to his kitchen phone. During one concert he
fainted in mid-piece and slumped to the floor.

His face was sunken now; his lips were correspondingly fleshier. His neck was sinewy, his hair a dark copper graying at the temples, his eyes moist with nostalgia and gentle kindness. In 2001 he was a guest at the summit between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. He took his partner, Tommy
Smith, his loyal sustainer throughout his later years; his forced outing and changes in the country’s mores had made that possible.
Tommy and Mrs. Putin got along famously in Spanish. Three years later, Van returned to Moscow to make a seventieth-birthday tour and receive the Order of Friendship from Putin. The Russian president cited Van’s contribution to increasing trust and understanding.
“Dear President,” Van effused in Russian, not perhaps having the full measure of his host, “I am very grateful to you, I love you and Madame, I love the Russian language, I love Russia!” If the country had altered beyond all recognition, his fans’ ardor had not cooled one bit. When he returned in 2009, to give his first master class at a festival in honor of Mstislav Rostropovich, they tried to
climb in through the windows, palm invitations behind the guards’ backs, and break into the hall. Two years later he was honorary chairman of the Tchaikovsky Competition piano jury; he refused to vote, since he could never bring himself to choose one contestant over another, as he had been chosen. Journalists abandoned all objectivity and lined up
clutching little cameras, to have their picture taken with him.
His fans, many white-haired now, clung to him in tears and proffered embroidered bedroom slippers and tea cozies, bunches of daises and, in one case, a perfectly ripe pear.

As the
fiftieth anniversary of his victory approached, America, too, crowned him with laurels: the
Kennedy Center Honors, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Medal of Arts. He had played for every president from Truman to Obama, but his real constituency was still his regular fans. When he went on the road to plug reissued CDs, huge lines of admirers, many young, waited for hours in malls for his autograph while he talked to each one at length, always standing up. One spring day, he landed on the
Texas Motor Speedway in a helicopter and inaugurated the newly built NASCAR track by playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before two hundred thousand racing fans.

Fame had set him up to be the greatest pianist of all, and he could not quite manage that. Yet even now the old Van Cliburn sometimes
flashed out, stunning a new generation with the power and lyricism that had made him one of the greats. And he truly had been: not across all the repertoire, not all the time, but at his best. Horowitz was more dazzling, Ashkenazy more secure, but no one could beat Van’s ability to communicate the sheer love and excitement of music to an audience. He called his audiences, as he called himself, to humility and quickened forgetfulness and tears of wonder.

In 2012 he was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Ex-presidents, movie stars, and divas called on him. Choirs sang him Baptist hymns. Among the most cherished visitors were Liu Shikun and Yuri Klimov, his driver in 1958, who had served a lifetime as a diplomat specializing in the English-speaking world. “For the first time since I was four years old and was made to be a choirboy,” Van told one visitor,
“I feel liberated.”

He died on February 27, 2013. He had planned his funeral with the same particularity he brought to his music. The coffin was heavy with white lilacs, like Russia in the spring. The Fort Worth Orchestra played, and massed choirs sang him to his rest with his favorite hymns and “Moscow Nights.” Amid the eulogies from world leaders, the most moving was from Olga Rostropovich, the daughter of his old friend Mstislav.
“It is hard to describe what Van Cliburn meant to Russia, to the Russian people, and to my family,” she said. “He was part of our lives. He was our heartbeat. He was our Pushkin and our Rachmaninoff. For my parents, the mere mention of his name lit up their faces.”

Henrietta Belayeva, Van’s loyal and loving interpreter, had predeceased him by just a few months. Irina Garmash, his most constant fan, who had written him heartfelt letters every two weeks since 1958, died two months before him, run over by a car. Yet millions of other Russians mourned him as a native son, as was fitting for a people who were his greatest love. “Van was the
highlight of my life,” says Aschen Mikoyan quietly, and she was far from alone.

His world was not the real world. He lived in an idealized past of nobility and goodness, elevating sadness and redeeming grace. No
one was more surprised than he when his innocence and outreaching talent made a mark on the world, because, in his heart, he was simply the servant of the composers he loved. As the gears of international relations turned and, for a moment, clicked into place, he was delighted to play his part, but he knew it was not he who had eased the way. It was the music he played, the songs of humanity that, when all the leaders were gone and when he was gone, too, would be there to feed hearts for all time.